Habit(at)

I’ve been in this city for less than three weeks, and already I’m wrapping myself in the comfort of habit: where I eat; how I get from place to place; my daily routine.

As a result, I’ve been trying to mix things up a bit. It’s amazing how much difference just crossing the road at a different intersection makes. If instead of walking along E 52nd on the Southern side and turning left down Lexington before crossing at 51st to enter the subway, I cross at 52nd and walk down the opposite side of Lexington, suddenly a view of the Chrysler building is revealed.

The joint second tallest building in the city, and I had no idea it was there until I changed my habit by a few tens of metres.

Total bizarre wonderfulness

I’ve always struggled with the “hacker” terminology, finding it quite limiting and a hurdle to explaining what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to the various people I find myself having to explain what hackspaces/hackerspaces are about to. However, I’ve long been a fan of how Noisebridge presents itself. This extract from their wiki:

Noisebridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning. Noisebridge is also more than a physical space, it’s a community with roots extending around the world. [...] We make stuff. So can you.

The definition is in terms of the verbs, not the tools that are used to realise the projects.

I’ve just come across this short introductory video to Noisebridge which I also find presses a lot of my buttons – loving the emphasis on creativity of all sorts: expressed in the space via the craft area, the darkroom, the kitchen, the gas cylinders in the background as Mitch talks, and the massive library! Check out the video below:

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Note the importance of community. We always took this as our starting point for fizzPOP, but unfortunately we didn’t manage to get a cohesive group together last time. As you can probably tell, I would absolutely love it if Birmingham could support a Noisebridge equivalent, but ultimately it’s down to the community as to what happens.

Head on over to this recent thread on the fizzPOP discussion group where it seems momentum is gathering around fizzPOP 2.0. If you want to contribute, now would be a good time to do so.

People in; slightly different people out

Museums as experience machines

So far my 2010 has been very focussed on schools and learning as I first spent a week responding to the second wave of Creative Partnership calls for this academic year and then attending interviews as a result.

Roughly half of the interviews I am invited to involve having to deliver a short activity (10-20 minutes) to a small group of the children. Considering my whole approach to projects is based on collaboration and a particular process aimed at responding to each individual context, it’s quite strange to find myself being judged on solo delivery of something workshoppy to a group I’ve not had any previous contact with!

I’d like to think that with my cross-disciplinary background one of my main selling points is that with pupil-led projects I’m pretty well equipped to be able to bring in practical skills that relate to wherever we end up. This too makes it tricky to decide on just one activity to represent me, because I’m not working from a starting point of offering a particular medium in response to a brief. Again all about the process.

Anyhoo, irony of the situation aside, these activities can be very interesting in their own right.

On Monday I was in a school that was looking for someone to help facilitate Year 5 (9-10 years old) in designing and making their “Museum of Water”. I was really interested in this call because of the way it had been presented as very pupil-led and also because, through my work with pervasive games and hackerspaces, I’ve been involved in various conversations coming from museum professionals that resonate strongly with those of schools. We all want meaningful interactions.

15 minutes isn’t really enough time for introductions and then anything much in the way of making, so I decided to aim for something much more feasible …like a paradigm shift!

I wanted the school to see their museum-to-be not as a collection of objects, or of documentation of learning objectives, but as a process. People go into the museum and the museum has some sort of effect on them such that the people leaving the museum are slightly different to when they went in. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I started the session in my favourite manner – by getting things wrong.

Hi, my name’s Nikki and I do all sorts of creative stuff. I’m here because I saw your advert for someone to help you make a Museum of Water.

Well, I thought that was really very easy, so I just went ahead and made it for you. [places 2 litre lemonade bottle partially filled with water on table]

Can I have my £3000, please?

[Silence]

Oh, hang on!

[Places bottle on top of cardboard box pedestal]

[Silence accompanied by glances]

What’s wrong? Can I have my money please?

From this starting point, we were able to have a conversation where the pupils explained to me that, even if I labelled the water, just to have a bottle of water on display wasn’t good enough – they wanted a museum that was interactive and taught people interesting things. They weren’t very impressed with my offering at all.

My next move was to invite everyone down to the other end of the room where I had cleared some floorspace. Within the context of what they had just told me, I introduced the idea that I wanted them to think of their museum as an experience machine. I wasn’t interested in what was inside it right now, but I wanted to think of who went in, and what we wanted them to be like when they left.

Quick profiles of incoming and outgoing museum visitors

Two of the children lay down on some large pieces of paper and struck appropriate poses whilst we drew around them. First of all we gathered around the outgoing visitor and noted and sketched our thoughts about what we wanted people to be doing and feeling after visiting our museum. I was really impressed at the contributions made in what I think was less than 5 minutes.

At one point I announced I was going to write down the obvious and added “happy”. This triggered a conversation about whether we would ever want people to leave the museum feeling sad. Yes they said: there were some very serious things relating to the topic of water and they might want people to be moved by these. When I asked for an example, one boy said that sometimes people drown in water. We agreed it would be important to teach people how to be safe.

With very little time left, we quickly added some thoughts to the picture of the incoming visitor. These were very illuminating in terms of how they perceived museums. Or how they thought museums were perceived – anyway, a very stark difference to the very positive picture they had painted in the previous two activities!

And that was the end of the session ..or it was supposed to be: it took a bit of effort to get the children to stop adding to the picture!

A few pupils helped me take photos of the drawings before I departed (I left the originals with the school – along with the bottle of water, for which I kindly waived the £3000 fee). Below is a slideshow of some of the images…

They’ve set themselves some very high standards in light of what appears to be a somewhat challenging target audience – I hope they can realise them.

A selected chronology of thoughts on people, space and the things in between

A-levels

In the final of my three years of doing Art and Design at A-level, I found my groove working with installations. I remember a hut I constructed on and around the railings at the top of the stairs to the department office, where you had to weave yourself through small openings before clambering into a small chamber with a computer running a sort of hyper-linked labyrinth of loosely associated words and images.

Another vivid memory is of being hidden behind a curtain in a blacked-out teaching hut, waiting for the right moment to connect the wires to the car battery and start the projection screen rotating.

An outdoor piece involved the construction and installation of periscopes around the college campus, revealing new views over roofs and around corners. Nice moments of interaction with people at either end.

Games

I’ve recently come to think of the pervasive games work I do – and the way that I do it, and the why that I do it – as being an expanded mode of installation art. The key concerns around affecting perception of space are still there, just I’m now planning around a much more complex and dynamic system. More variables. More risk. More interesting?

Sensors

Through involvement with the fizzPOP hackerspace, I’ve been thinking about more traditional formats of installation again, this time using sensors to make the spaces responsive to the people within them.

A new year’s project is going to involve using a violin to ‘play’ graphics via movement on a macro and micro scale, but in my mind’s eye I can also see some of Atsuo Okamoto‘s stone carvings theramin’d up in a dark barn somewhere. A solitary experience. You interacting with the mass of the stone without touching it.

Othello

'Orchestra Platform' by Pete Ashton on Flickr

Last night I went to see took part in Birmingham Opera Company‘s production of Othello. It was marvellous and impressive in so many different ways (Pete’s index of reviews) but the thing that really struck me was the way in which, in a space that was empty bar for the orchestra’s platform, the audience was moved around to effectively create different sets and scenes. From being penned in shoulder-to-shoulder with a few other hundred people looking up at the actors above through to sitting against the walls watching Desdemona across a vacuum of red carpet.

The way so many of us were were all steered so effectively by cues visual, audible and physical was masterful. There’s something here that fits in with the thread of installation thinkings. Massively multi-player installation perhaps?

'Othello' from urban_loiterer on Flickr

'Othello' from urban_loiterer on Flickr

Uncertain Eastside presentation for Performance Fictions symposium

Sadie Plant invited me to contribute to her presentation on ‘psychogeography and the city’ as part of the Performance Fictions symposium held at the Electric Cinema yesterday.

‘Performance Fictions’ is the fourth event in art-writing-research network created by researchers from BCU, Goldsmiths, Reading University and University of the Arts London. Article Press, BCU, will publish the papers and contributions from the various events in Spring 2010, to be distributed by Central Books. The volumes will constitute series one of Article Press’s art-writing-research publications.

After Sadie explored Birmingham’s historical rootlessness and uncertainty of place – its location at and function as, a junction – I gave a 10-minute presentation about the Uncertain Eastside work in progress. Below is a transcript with images.

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When I graduated from BIAD about 3 years ago, it was to emerge into a lot of talk about plans for a brand new cultural quarter covering a chunk of one side of the city. I was concerned and confused by the apparent desire to suddenly plonk a fully-formed artist-led space into position amongst the warehouses.

Detail from THE ANTI-TALENT ZONE

My response was to wipe the streets of the designated area free of their existing names. And to add one.

The politics of regeneration is beyond the scope of today’s presentation, and I have little patience for it anyway, but I want to take the opportunity to use this image to show you how closely the borders of the City Council’s Eastside regeneration area are linked to the major traffic routes in and around the city.

In green, as we go up the left hand side is the ring road, going up, just out of shot to the roundabout where it meets the A38 on its way to spaghetti junction. Coming down via Corporation Street, the pedestrian routes of Hight Street and the Bullring area, and the across Digbeth Deritend back to the ring road. The criss-cross of roads and pathways are again being used to define parts of Birmingham.

In 2006 this was mostly all unknown territory to me. By 2009 it was still mostly unknown territory, but now with small incursions around Digbeth and Curzon Street. When I decided I wanted to return to some of the questions raised by the area’s regeneration, it was apparent that my first step should not to be to research it in an academic manner, and subject myself to all the spin, but to get out there and experience it directly.

Bench on roundabout on Coventry Road

Construction site with sort-of graffiti

Greasy spoon internet café

Shops and bus stops under the railway lines

Socks

Subway rambler

I’ve spent the last month and a half repeatedly walking around the perimeter that defines Eastside, paying attention to how these spaces are being used at different times and by different groups of people. I’ve also been wrestling with how I might fit into the picture.

I wanted to document the process of walking this line, so on each 90-minute circuit I took with me 2 satnav GPS devices that I have programmed to log my position once every second. Rather than doing a straight-forward trace of my journey though, I was interested to see how the cityscape affected my position as seen by the machines.

GPS drawing from two laps around Eastside

Detail from previous slide

Each of these lines joins my position as determined by the machine in my left hand to my position as determined by the machine in my right hand. The longer the line, the more they disagree.

Despite what we are led to believe, GPS is actually pretty flaky. All sorts of things can affect its accuracy. There may be 3 rather than 8 satellites overhead at that particular time; my body may be blocking the satellite signal; and large buildings and areas of concrete can bounce the signals around. All these affect the perceived position.

Errors and glitches

Errors and glitches

Looking at the results from any one walk I can see a whole host of different glitches and errors. To be honest, they’re what make GPS an interesting thing for me to work with.

Composite drawing from 6 laps around Eastside

Through overlaying the traces of several laps, however, you can start to filter out the anomalies … or at least start to read which of them are caused by the fabric of the city-scape.

Here’s the cumulative result after 6 laps…

Stood near the base of the Rotunda

This detail is from the area at the base of the rotunda, at the edge of the Bullring shopping centre. The long, haphazard lines caused by the tall, closely-packed buildings.

Ring road

By contrast, the comparatively open space of the ring road gives shorter, much more uniform lines, occasionally buffeted around by a large warehouse building.

Ashted Circus

Here is Ashted Circus, where I momentarily loose contact with the satellite signals as I go through some underpasses.

The Other Side

Whilst walking with the satnavs I was given glimpses of other sorts of errors – biases towards the car, roads I couldn’t cross, residential areas the other side of seemingly impassable road boundaries.

Beautiful scary

Sunken oases inside the rings of roundabouts – beautiful but also possibly harbouring great danger.

However, due to restraints in using the GPS logging, I could only observe these in passing. I had to keep moving at a steady pace. I could speculate, but never investigate.

Participants document a building in Digbeth

So, last Sunday I invited others to join me for an investigative walk. Nominally following the route around the edge of Eastside, but allowed the freedom to drift from it to explore things that caught our eye.

Walk

Look

Touch

Climb

Dare

We walked, we explored, we looked at stuff, we touched stuff, we climbed on stuff and we dared to cross to the in-between places.

Blog post on Digbeth is Good, http://digbeth.org/2009/10/a-walk-around-uncertain-eastside/

Pete Ashton's blog post, http://peteashton.com/2009/10/eastside_is_uncertain/

People are now starting to post their photos from the day online, and their accounts of what happened are starting to appear on blogs where the stories and viewpoints overlap. We also exchanged stories between us whilst we were walking along the route. In situ. It’s my feeling that we needed the 3.5 hours of walking to get to the point where we could gather around the ‘map’ at the pub and have an in-depth conversation about what it signifies. I find this happens a lot – that you need the group performance before you can get to the meaty discussion.

I guess that in terms of this symposium, we’re talking more about performed narratives, rather than performed fictions per se, but I’m expecting the edges to blur somewhat, especially as we move into the phase where we compile the accompanying publication of thus chapter of the project.

After unfurling some of the stories, we will gather some of the images taken by the participants into a publication with the aim of making a document to record this face of Birmingham before it reinvents itself again.

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From here, Sadie speculated that this sort of drift along a route defined by roadways, exploring the details, progress logged by satnav devices, might be psychogeography 21st Century style.

Huffing Duck

A few weeks ago, one @kitlarks (who I don’t know) appeared on Twitter, apparently having been blackmailed to sign up in order to receive a huffing duck from, I believe, @EmmaGx (who I don’t know either).

I don’t really know what the deal was, but it appeared to involve signing up, a certain number of posts and an uploaded avatar in exchange for a drawing of a huffing duck. This seemed to me to not be a Twitter-like way of approaching things.

Anyway, one thing led to another (not exactly crowd-sourcing, I know, but an interesting exercise nonetheless) and a collaborative huffing duck was incrementally produced in a vaguely exquisite corpse-esque manner. Ok, not exactly exquisite corpse either…

You can see the animations of the cumulative contributions here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

As you can see, the internet badgers ate the huffing duck during the process of adding the head at stage 8. Unfortunate, but if you look carefully there’s a nice after-image huffing duck in glorious Technicolor burned onto your retina, and that’s perhaps as it should be.

I’m not sure what happens to the huffing duck next: whether it fades to white, or whether it will be resurrected to continue its evolution. In the meantime however, this post is by way of setting aside a small slice of cyberspace to say that a huffing duck happened and it happened because of these people (alphabetical order):

@alexhughes, @benjibrum, @graphiquillan, @haling, @lauraehall, @mookstudios, @soba_girl.

A very big thank you to all involved!

We are the Interstitials

Foreword:

This post has been brewing for several days now and has just been tipped into existence by the latest post on Museum 2.0 about deliberately unsustainable business models. Other kindling includes: this comment from 2007 where I suggest some metallurgical references for renaming structural holes; Pete Aston’s tweet about being comfortable with the idea that he’ll be doing something completely different come 2015; and the job titles I variously use to describe to people what I do which include “transdisciplinary independent person”, “investigator” and “interstitial”.

We are the Interstitials is a metaphor based on principles of interstitial solutes in metals.

We are the Interstitials:

We are smaller than the structures around us. We inhabit the gaps the host matrix cannot occupy itself.
Our small size gives us speed and responsiveness and though the sites we may occupy are ultimately determined by the host matrix, we are mobile and select which of the available positions we inhabit.

Our host is rigid; bound to the other similar entities around it in predictable patterns. We are independent; we may cluster around locations or other interstitials, but our interactions shift as required. We frequently move on, jumping between adjacent sites. There’s no problem, it’s just how we are.

Our host may regard us as defects, but though our numbers are small, our effects are wide-reaching and can drastically change the properties of the matrix we operate within. The energy-fields around us, induced by our presence, often make it easy for us to interact with other types of perceived ‘defect’, often impeding their motion or changing the way they in turn affect the matrix.

We are small, we are mobile, we affect. We are the interstitials.

my new camel

This morning I went along for an introductory visit to the local primary school where I will be doing a project with some of the students.

I found myself in the staffroom with some teachers fresh from an assembly where they’d had two dancers performing. One thing led to another and suddenly the conversation had evolved into the one about Not Getting Modern Art. You know the one – it always starts with The Bricks and The Bed.

I let it go. I didn’t have the heart to introduce myself as the artist who’d just been asked to do something with the reception class’ bricks.

Observation became participation after stepping in to perform banana-opening duties at break time and the food-related theme continued with invisible chocolate soup and an invisible glass of wine with cream on top.

You gotta love it.